Unscripted: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship pdfdrive com

I’m great friends with his sister.
I love his child.
OMG, the thought of being single and dating again scares me.
Whatever the rationale, it compels unchanging and continuing displeasing
momentum. And the longer it goes on, the harder the momentum is to break.

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And then the excuse becomes, “But we’ve been together for twelve years!”
The cognitive machinations behind momentum paralysis is a 
sunk-cost
fallacy.
Sunk costs are time or money investments that cannot be recovered.
These costs, and the perceived pain of acknowledging their loss, are what keep
you doing shit you shouldn’t be doing.
For example, let’s say you tragically followed the advice, “Do what you love,”
and opened a restaurant in your city’s historic district. After six years and
multiple business repositions and marketing initiatives, it’s clear: Your eatery is
barely profitable, earning your time a net of six dollars per hour on a seven-day,
eighty-four-hour workweek. But yeah, you’re “doing what you love,” right? So is
it time to quit and do something else?
Logically, yes. But momentum paralysis says no. It says, “Hang on,” and then
unabashedly reminds you of the sunk costs: Remember that long fight with city
hall to get this location? Remember how hard it was hiring Chef Chavez, one of
the city’s best chefs? Remember winning the Daily Gazette’s “Best New
Restaurant” title six years ago? All of these memories, the sunk costs, keep you
grinding a grind that should no longer be grinded.
In Chapter 40, we explore the business side of this quitting decision, but on
the mind’s side, 
momentum paralysis keeps you chained to your past while
wasting away your future
. This is important, especially for new entrepreneurs,
because multiple failures precedes success. If momentum paralysis causes your
first entrepreneurial failure to stew for ten years, you’re going to run out of life.
Momentum paralysis and sunk costs are also why aspiring entrepreneurs stay
aspiring. On my forum, there are several medical doctors who are tired of
medicine and its domination by insurance companies and government
regulation. By day, they manage emergency rooms. By night, they’re building
businesses. In my chats with these professionals, I can see their greatest challenge
won’t be business struggles but letting go of sunk costs associated with medicine.
Our past decisions have deeply etched emotional attachments. And the
greater those emotional attachments are—years of schooling, training, residency
—the harder abandonment becomes, hence not choosing what’s best for the
future but instead desiring to not see your past investment wasted.
In the end, momentum paralysis is an illogical reaction to loss aversion.
Again, thinking how you think gives you the logic to diffuse emotions stoking
the fires. If you had to walk twenty miles to see your favorite musician, and
during your walk’s thirteenth mile discovered the concert was next week, would
you walk the next seven miles? Or would you logically admit the mistake and

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turn around? Of course you would, but inertial paralysis keeps us walking toward
an empty venue. What empty outcomes are you walking toward?

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CHAPTER 27
BULLSHIT FROM BULLSHITTERS:
CRUTCHES, CLICHéS, AND CULTS
The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to
others is relatively an exception.